Breaking the Israeli stranglehold on Gaza

Activists manage to break through the Israeli blockade of the Gaza coast:

GAZA, Aug 23 (Reuters) – Two boats carrying activists challenging an Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip reached the shore of the Hamas-controlled territory on Saturday.

The 44 “Free Gaza” activists from 17 nations, who had set out on Friday from Cyprus in two wooden boats, were met by thousands of Palestinians who cheered along the shoreline at their arrival.

“Today is a special day, we hope it’s the beginning. We have opened the path and we hope there will be more travellers,” said Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian peace activist, after the ship anchored off shore.

Israel may have “withdrawn” from Gaza back in 2005, but took care to keep its control of Gaza’s borders; all its borders, not just the ones with Israel. The usual excuse is terrorism, but the reality is the slow economic strangulation of Gaza as part of a deliberate strategy to starve the territory into submission. Even the sea is off-limit for the people of Gaza, with Israeli warships firing on any fishing ship getting too far out of the coast. What the activists attempted to do is draw attention to this strangulation, but also to actually break the blockade. Just having another press stunt is not enough, but fortunately it seems the presence of the activists has enabled some fishermen to actually fish:

A statement by the group said the activists boarded Palestinian fishing boats on Monday and travelled with local fishermen eight miles (13 km) off shore, passing a 6-mile limit they said was generally enforced by the Israeli military.

The Gaza fishermen said that Israeli ships normally fire at them in deep waters and they had not travelled that far from shore in more than five years.

“We hope we will be able to go that far every day because it is our right, and it should not be a one-time event because of the presence of the foreigners,” said 27-year-old fisherman Fawzi al-Hessi.

The Palestinians themselves than are realistic about the chances of Israel allowing this situation to continue once the cameras have gone… To properly break the stranglehold the Israelis have on Gaza, not to mention the West Bank, there needs to be constant pressure from Europe and America and our governments need to stop supporting Israel.

Gaza, Israel and the news

One of the things that has me depressed on blue monday, allegedly the most depressing date of the year is the realisation that nothing ever changes in how the media reports on Israel and its treatment of Palestinians. There were quite a few reports on the forced shutdown of an important powerplant in Gaza this weekend. Most reports explained correctly how this shutdown was due to lack of fuel and how this was due to Israel stopping fuel getting into Gaza, as retaliation for increased rocket attacks from Gaza. Some reports went even so far as to gently condemn Israel for this, or at least allow some Palestinian spokeperson to do so.

Missing from most, if not all reports however, was the real context of this story. Israel withdrew its settlements and army from Gaza in 2005, but it has never given up control over it. All border crossings, including the sea and along Gaza’s borders with Egypt, are controlled by Israel; Gaza doesn’t have control of its own airspace, and much of its infrastructure, e.g. the electricity network is dependent on Israel. As one look at a map of its territory shows, the Gaza Strip has no hope of ever being self sufficient in most products. The Gaza Strip depends on being able to exports the few things it can (e.g. cut flowers and citrus fruit) to pay for the import of everything it lacks; therefore when the Israelis close the border Gaza starts to starve. And the Israelis have been playing this game at least since the Oslo Accords, when the Occupied Territories gained a nominal autonomy, trying to starve the Palestinians in submission, with added airstrikes when necessary. In a sense, far from being an independent territory, Gaza is Israel’s largest, open air prison.

But if you depend on the mainstream media to tell you about Gaza, you’d think the problems only started last week, when those thankless Palestinians started launching rockets at Israel, for no apparant reason. The blockade, even when condemned, is only described as a reaction to these bombardments, with all context carefully removed. That these rocket attacks happened in response to earlier Israeli airstrikes, is never explained. Instead every cycle of violence is presented as started by the Palestinians, with a collective amnesia for anything that happened earlier than whatever the latest outrage Israel said was the reason for their actions.